Tag Archives: Alan McMahon

She Stoops To Conquer, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Alan Price, Oliver Gomm, Howard Chadwick, Guy Lewis, Jon Trenchard, Andrew Whitehead, Robert Took, Gilly Tompkins, Hannah Edwards, Lauryn Redding, Alan McMahon.

The 18th Century was one of richness in the field of theatre. By the time Oliver Goldsmith’s play, She Stoops To Conquer, had been performed for its debut performance the sight of women acting on the stage was so commonplace that it was an absurdity to have been forbidden from performing in the first place. There had been so many plays that had benefited from King Charles II proclamation a century before, so many talented writers getting more emotion from a finished piece and so many gifted women being rightly lauded that it the art of the Comedy of Manners took off in such a way and perhaps no more so than in the fantastic She Stoops To Conquer.

The Grand Gesture, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.

Cast: Michael Hugo, Samantha Robinson, Angela Bain, Howard Chadwick, Claire Storey, Paul Barnhill, Alan McMahon, Robert Pickavance, Dyfig Morris, Sophie Hatfield, Hester Arden.

Whilst the overall central theme of The Grand Gesture may be worrying to some and have others wondering how you can have a comedy set around the premise of a man wanting to end his life, it shouldn’t though detract from the very superb way that Northern Broadsides, perhaps one of the keenly anticipated companies that makes its way on regular basis to the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre, took on Nikolai Erdman’s brilliant work The Suicide.

Northern Broadsides Make A ‘Grand Gesture’ At The Playhouse With Adaptation Of Russian Black Comedy.

Following the critical success of last year’s A Government Inspector, Northern Broadsides’ associate director Conrad Nelson and playwright Deborah McAndrew once again team up with The Grand Gesture. Based on Nikolai Erdman’s rarely-performed comic classic The Suicide, this pitch-black, break-neck farce of a man living on the edge comes to the Liverpool Playhouse from Tuesday 12th to Saturday 16th November.

Simeon Duff is desperate. After a failed last-ditch attempt to solve his problems by learning to play the tuba, he finally decides there’s only one way out: suicide.

The Canterbury Tales, Theatre Review. Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.

Originally published by L.S. Media. March 24th 2010.

Cast: Isia Bennison, Emily Butterfield, Matt Connor, Phil Corbitt, Laura Cox, Andy Cryer, Michael Hugo, Rosie Jenkins, Alan McMahon, David Newman, Rob Pickavance, Matthew Rixon, Richard Standing, Andrew Whitehead.

After the success of Medea earlier in the year, Northern Broadsides have come back once more to Liverpool with the intention of staging a difficult piece of work for the delight of the Playhouse audience. This time they tackled one of English literature’s defining moments, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.